


Darkness Driving Bliss

by devilwearsplaid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fic, Case Fic, M/M, Supernatural and J2 Big Bang Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:36:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilwearsplaid/pseuds/devilwearsplaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What's the last thing you remember, Dean?"</p>
<p>Dean doesn't want to answer him. He remembers a lot of things he'd sooner forget if he could.</p>
<p>"You're dead. Cas is AWOL ninety-five percent of the time and a dick during the rest. Life pretty much sucks ass. How's that for reality?"</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Dean gets a glimpse into his future. The bunker is a surprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkness Driving Bliss

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2013 spn-j2-bigbang challenge on LiveJournal.
> 
> I simply must thank [Amber](http://fabien-w1nn1ng.tumblr.com/) for being the most incredible beta I could ask for. I don't know what I'd do without you!

June 2011  
Newport, Rhode Island

It’s a beautiful house.

Really, it is, she tells herself as she steps out of her car, and it shouldn’t even be called a house when it’s more of an outright mansion, the stone baronial estate guarded by acres of trees on three sides with only its back end exposed to overlook a panorama of the Atlantic ever gliding in its direction. The huge front gates immediately declare the old money of the Gilded Age, opening up to an overgrown chaos of woodlands, cut through by a winding drive leading up to the front entrance. It could be beautiful, if thought and consideration were to be put back into the building and its grounds once again.

There’s no denying its failure in earning the honorific title of home, at least not yet, not for Katherine Mandeville and her daughter, whose sole purpose for coming here has been to escape, to escape the inundation of apologies and condolences, of long looks, the endless deliveries of fruit baskets, casseroles, and pies. At least here there’s some privacy, the privacy that comes along with not knowing anyone, not in any real sense. As for the few people Katherine does encounter, she’s quick to brush past them, like a fish flitting away from an approaching, encircling net.

Five times a week, Tina Wilkins is that net.

“Mrs. Mandeville?” Tina calls from the main hall, and when she catches sight of her boss, Katherine is quick to fall back on the old excuse of chasing after daughter, Delia, to escape. It’s a habit she’s become accustomed to using whenever she wants to avoid the hired help, or when her mother or psychiatrist ask questions she doesn’t have answers for.

The attic has become Delia’s new favorite room in the house since she’s discovered the treasure trove of belongings the previous owners have left behind. When Katherine finds her, Delia has already opened a trunk full of costumes, now piecing together an ensemble befitting a plundering princess, pairing oversized pirate boots with bright pink and white taffeta, but then something new catches Delia’s eye, redirecting her focus elsewhere. She sits in front of it, her attention entirely devoted to the small wooden box she’s placed on the floor as if there’s nothing else more fascinating in the entire world. She opens it slowly, revealing a perfectly round object. A crystal ball.

“What’s it say, Dee?” Katherine asks, expecting a fairytale forecast. But Delia only looks, not even hearing her mother’s voice, just studying the crystal ball’s smooth surface in a silence suddenly broken by a piercing scream coming from one of the rooms below.

\--

Dean Winchester is in a mostly empty coffeehouse where he scans the headlines of three different periodicals, careful to ignore the articles providing scientific explanations for last year’s upsurge in natural disasters because not one of them mentions the devil’s name and the real reason the entire planet was hanging on the verge, about to go under. He pauses, glances around, removes a flask from his jacket with less stealth than he thinks he has, and spikes his brew into something that should at least get him through until lunch.

“Woman Dies on Plane of Unknown Causes,” reads the headline of one article that doesn’t appear to be about the Apocalypse that wasn’t, but Dean shudders at the thought of having to catch a flight to investigate that one.

Next he reads the byline of “Dude, Where’s My Porsche?” wherein some guy claims a ghost stole his vehicle, but the boy who cried ghost sounds a little too douche and not enough spooked, so Dean considers it a no-go, striking out again.

An article on crop circles might seem like a lead, but he’s learned the hard way that UFO signs and sightings never pan out. He briefly, stupidly wonders why there isn’t such a thing as a hunter’s version of a police scanner, but hunters are independent bastards, and no one more than him. At least on most days. All he wants is to find a little blurb about werewolves stalking among us or a wendigo sighting on camping grounds. Something cut and dry, hunting at its purest.

He stares blankly at the unoccupied chair across from him, at the seat where Sam should be, until he can almost see the disapproval on his brother’s face for drinking in the morning. He decides his coffee could use a little more vodka, taking a quick nip right from the flask before concealing it again.

The next time the door opens a great gust of wind follows the new patron through, blowing Dean’s newspapers off the table. Terrific, he thinks, as he bends down to pick them up. Another customer offers his help, handing him one of the pages that got carried the furthest away, and Dean knows that he should at least say thanks, but he can’t quite bring himself to make eye contact let alone speak to the guy. He just grabs the paper and returns to his seat. If somebody were there to tell him to quit bothering and take the rest of the day or year off, he’d listen.

But there’s no one, so he smoothes out the sheet of newspaper he hadn’t realized he’d practically crushed into a ball when he sees the headline, which reads, “Miss Scarlet in the Ballroom with the—Chandelier? Murder Mystery at Newport Estate.”

Dean’s heart jolts with hopeful excitement as he skims through the rest of the article. He dumps the rest of his coffee, picks up his stuff, and hopes for an everyday, garden-variety vengeful spirit whose bones his fingers are already itching to torch.

Bob Dylan keeps him company on the drive from Tennessee to Newport, Rhode Island. Tape cassettes don’t talk back, and that’s both the good thing and the bad thing about them.

\--

“But the police were already here. I gave my statement,” Katherine Mandeville says to Dean after finally agreeing to open the front gate for him. The place is huge, palatial, lacking only a moat. Dean catches a vibe that he doesn’t think he particularly likes, which, for him, translates as good news.

“I know,” he says, practiced, rehearsed, “but I’m with the FBI. Agent Smith.” He flashes the badge, a now routine gesture that has since lost its small thrill. She glances at it, then signals for him to come inside. Dean barely acknowledges her presence at first, attention drawn to their surroundings. He whistles, impressed. The foyer alone is at least double the size of his motel room. “Nice castle.”

“What can I do for you, Agent?” Katherine asks with a cold disinterest.

“Just a few questions, and I’ll be out of here in no time. Says here you found the victim, Christina Wilkins.” He takes out his cell phone, absently scrolls through the list of contacts to keep up the pretense of actually being a part of this investigation, deliberately skipping the ones beginning with C.

“Tina. Yeah, I did,” she says, dispassionately. He’d expected more of a reaction from someone who recently found the housekeeper gruesomely murdered. “Cold as Ice” plays somewhere in the back of his brain.

“Can you think of anyone else who could’ve been in the house at the time?” he asks, and he can judge from her reaction that she’s heard this question before, probably a lot.

“As far as I know, it was just me and my daughter. And Tina, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Dean repeats, distracted, eyeing her wedding band. “And Mr. Mandeville? Where’s he in all of this?” Dean gestures, waving a hand in the air as if expecting her husband to come strolling into the room at any given moment.

“He was in Boston last year,” she explains, voice quieter, more strained. “You know. When the quakes hit.”

Dean feels as if he’s been dropkicked to the floor. “I see,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else he could say to that. Sorry the Devil’s a homicidal maniac? The truth, he’s learned, doesn’t always go over so well, and that was one lesson he’d learned the hard way. He knows he’s staring, but he’s seeing her, really seeing her, for the first time since they’ve met. He recognizes and understands what he sees, and it strikes a little too close to his own heart.

“Just a few more questions,” Dean says, changing the subject. “Did Tina mention anything unusual before her death?”

“No,” Katherine answers, and he knows it’s another question she’s heard before. Now for a few she hasn’t.

“Have you noticed the lights flickering at all? What about strange noises? Things getting moved around, misplaced, disappearing altogether?”

He could probably cut the silence with a knife. She’s either deeply considering his questions or contemplating his sanity.

“No,” she says slowly, as if she’s trying to work out if he’s possibly making a joke.

“Rats in the basement, maybe? Or the attic?” Because he’s Dean Winchester, and he just has to push too far.

“What does that have to do with anything?” She stares at him in disbelief, probably a little offended. He knows that he’s not making any progress here, so he cops out and asks, “Mind if I take a quick look at the crime scene before I go?”

She clearly wishes he’d asked that five questions ago. “Yeah, that’s fine,” she says, pointing him in the right direction. He thanks her for her time, hands her his card, and then she makes a quick exit, retreating into another of the estate’s many spacious rooms. Standing there by himself, Dean feels utterly alone in its immensity.

\--

He enters through the double doors to the once grand ballroom, which is where the body was found. The room’s far end holds its main feature, a dignified fireplace of brick and marble, rippled black and white to coordinate with the floor, contrasting against the rich velvet drapery dressing the windows. The now infamous chandelier is unsurprisingly missing, and the room somehow looks emptier for its absence. Dean imagines the body punctured with its spires, and wonders how someone like Katherine Mandeville reacted when she found her housekeeper like that. He doesn’t picture her screaming, just staring up at the victim with a cold, resigned acceptance. He takes out the EMF meter, and the lights perform their usual song and dance, breaking the silence along with the soft echo in the back of Dean’s head asking, “What’s that, a walkman?” to which Dean had once replied, “Dude, it’s homemade.” That was a lifetime ago.

“What’s that?” a small voice asks, breaking the volume of Dean’s silence.

“It’s a phone. What else?” Suspiciously, he takes stock of the pirate princess as she stares back at him in calm disbelief. In the distance, he hears Katherine calling her daughter’s name.

Before the girl goes, she tells him that she’s going to be a hospital nurse someday, doffs the tiara she’s wearing, and holds it out to him until he reluctantly takes it off her hands.

\--

The smell of the coroner’s office is something Dean thinks he’ll never get used to. He has to take at least three good showers before he stops thinking he smells like a dead person, and wonders what it is about someone that would make them want to look at dead bodies all day, every day. Then he considers his own line of work and decides it’s better to leave those type of questions at the door.

Dr. Schreiner meets him in the lab, rattles off the rundown about tox samples, organ storage, and personal effects, and then grants him the freedom to take his time. She’s personable, for a coroner, and leaves a sterile quiet behind after she’s gone. Dean sighs, glad for the silence. Sometimes he thinks he feels more comfortable in the presence of the deceased than in the land of the living, where he’s still not sure he belongs.

He finds the corpse of Christina Wilkins, now almost a pincushion, and it makes him grimace to think how long it would have taken to dismantle the chandelier to free her body.

He doesn’t need to close his eyes to imagine Sam standing across the table from him in his coordinating fake FBI suit, a confident, kind of cocky smile on his face when his rock beats Dean’s scissors, loser gets the honor of poking the dead person. He remembers Sam in Sioux Falls, in Dr. Corman’s lab at St. James Medical Center holding human hearts with angelic markings on them in his hands.

He also remembers himself making a phone call. “Cas, it’s Dean,” he’d said. “Yeah, Room 31-C, basement level. St. James Medical Center.” He’d barely blinked, and already Castiel was standing in front of him, directly in front of him, confirming Sam’s suspicions.

It used to be that easy, but now Dean’s pretty convinced it’s been stitched somewhere in the fabric of creation that nothing in his life should ever come that easily, and if it does, then it isn’t intended to last. Maybe everything has just gone back to the way it’s supposed to be, with Sam dead and him powerless against it, no angel to help him now.

Dean rubs his eyes before putting the gloves on as if to rub the memories out or push them down far enough where he can’t see them, at least not fully.

\--

When he returns to the motel room he’s booked for the week, the first thing he does is find the bottle of Jack buried in his duffel bag. He loosens his tie, sinks back into the bed. The body he’d examined had given him no answers, not that he’d really known what he was looking for to begin with. Sam had always been better at that part of the job, the detective work, and Dad would always make the right calls. Dean’s walking in footsteps that are too impossible to fill. Sometimes he doesn’t know why he even bothers, but he does. He has to.

Even if that means drinking whiskey from a bottle while staring at a tiara he’d forgotten he’d acquired after lying to a kid who’s probably not even ten. He takes a better look at it and thinks it might not be the decorated piece of junk he’d assumed it was. He runs his fingers along the geometric shapes the diamonds make, scratching his nail along the side of one diamond before setting the stupid thing down on the nightstand. Under no circumstances is he allowing himself to Google search tiaras tonight.

Instead, he takes another drink as a slow and steady apology to himself for every bad decision he’s ever made in his life, which, he thinks, might be all of them.

\--

An hour and a half later, Dean’s slouched on the floor with his back against the bed, staring down blankly at the carpet, still working on that bottle. He avoids looking at Sam’s laptop, silently chastising him from the desk.

When he gives into it, he stumbles, nearly spilling Jack all over the keyboard. Sam would’ve handed him his ass for that one, and he most definitely would’ve deserved it.

He skims the police report again, still grumbling that a goddamn castle’s JARVIS of a security system conveniently malfunctioned at the worst possible time, although not really, because that’s just another indication in favor of something supernatural at work here. Research, he decides, is unavoidable at this stage in the game, so he might as well do it while buzzed, or sloshed, he reasons. It’s not as if he actually hates the research part of the job, but it’s practically been coded in his DNA that he just has to complain about doing it.

An online archive that’s obscure and academic enough for Sam to have drooled over yields what could potentially be the most promising piece to the puzzle yet. The article profiles the estate’s most infamous resident, a woman named Carmen Spencer, whose backyard musical revues and drawing room three-act Edwardian comedies acted as smoke and mirrors for a secret society involved in the occult, or so claims the thesis of the graduate student who’s writing a dissertation on local myths and urban legends.

Another hour passes, and Dean’s found himself distracted by Wikipedia. He’s reading up on theatrical forms and finds himself considering whether or not his life would qualify as melodrama when he realizes that he’s going to remember absolutely none of this come morning, which is probably a good thing.

He leaves the page about Carmen Spencer open for tomorrow, and then passes out with his jacket wrapped around his shoulders and his shoes still on. He doesn’t detect the invisible shape of a man standing at the edge of his bed at all.

\--

Winter 1991  
Spokane, Washington

Sam refuses to hand Dean the dice until he’s done rereading all of the directions, most of which Dean drowns out behind some royally obnoxious air guitar.

Dean’s been bored to tears for almost a week straight, so he’s especially impatient, gets louder as Sam tries to speak over him, and starts throwing stuff around. A purple peg hits Sam in the shoulder, bounces off him, rolls underneath the TV stand.

John steps inside, shaking off the cold. He’s been in and out all morning, making phone calls. Says, “You boys going to wrestle or play with those board games you make me cart around?”

It’s three board games and a deck of cards with the Jack of Hearts and Four of Clubs missing.

Sam freezes, pulls back after Dean does. Says, “No, sir. I was just teaching Dean how to play Life, and he’s being a sore loser about it.”

“Am not,” Dean mutters under his breath.

John doesn’t say anything, shuffles through some papers on the desk, picks up his journal, and heads back out again. Sam and Dean resume the game, with Sam explaining how to play and Dean mostly ignoring him.

\--

It’s a little late to order coffee, but he’s just woken up after having overslept by six hours with no one there to drag his ass out of bed and a barrage of dreams to keep him there, to compensate for his insomnia when he tries to go to sleep still sober.

His waiter, Matt, is all smiles and far too attentive. He’s extra vigilant as far as waiters go, refilling Dean’s coffee cup three times and telling him it’s on the house when the menu clearly states otherwise. Dean notices that he always has Matt’s attention, and that gets him a little suspicious.

Matt is quick to bring him his order, a double BLT with a side of extra greasy, extra crispy onion rings and this special sauce that had Matt singing its praises even after Dean was already sold on it.

After what seems like a fairly intense staring contest, Dean slips an ineffective “Christo” into the conversation during his fourth and last caffeine fix from Matt, who’s staring at him now for a different reason. So this is what paranoia looks like. Dean chalks it up to never having been a normal person to begin with. He tries to recover from mistaking being flirted with for demonic possession, but all he can hear is his own voice inside his head saying, “Something is broken in you.”

And maybe it’s true. He’s watching as the ghost of Sam pokes around his salad, stabbing cucumbers while absently theorizing about the case, when a phone call interrupts the reverie.

Katherine Mandeville sounds so panicked that Dean barely recognizes her voice and has to talk over her as he tries to calm her down.

“Something’s in the house,” she says, completely breathless. “The lights, they were flickering, just like you said. And I don’t know what it is, but it sounds like rats crawling in the walls, only—angrier.”

Terrific, Dean thinks, and now that he’s actually thinking again, he knows that he should’ve done better. He should’ve kept a better eye on the house, should’ve worked faster, stayed focused. Instead, he’s still trying to caffeinate himself awake at happy hour.

Messing up on the job only seems to happen when it really counts.

“What is it?” Katherine demands, and Dean figures that they’re at the point of no return now where she’ll believe the truth in all of its terrible, supernatural glory.

“You’ve got a ghost, I’m pretty sure,” Dean says, standing. He sees Matt, whose eyes are wide in disbelief from where he’s clearly eavesdropping while collecting the tip from the next table, but he refocuses on Katherine. He can coach her through getting out of the house, he reassures himself, when the call clicks, then fills with static.

Repeatedly saying her name doesn’t magically repair the connection, just earns him a few more stares.

He scrubs a hand over his face and thinks back to last night, which is still pretty foggy in his memory. He asks himself where in the world are Carmen Sandiego’s bones buried and hasn’t a clue. Finding and burning the bones would take hours to achieve, if her spirit’s even the culprit at all, and he’s got two people on his hands who need saving now.

He’s a better hunter than this, and he knows it. The Dean he was a few years back would’ve spun circles around him now and probably would’ve kicked his ass in the process.

He leaves Matt a handsome tip as recompense for being such a shitty customer. At least he’s still a better hunter than he is a human being.

\--

The gate is already opened when he drives up to the estate, and the front door unlocks without him having to pick it. The EMF detector buzzes off the charts, and he follows its frequency like a game of hot and cold.

It leads him through the main hall and into the kitchen, where the early evening sunlight has already begun to eclipse the tall windows, leaving half the kitchen in bright orange light and the rest in shadows. Dean senses movement before he actually hears what it is, what turns out to be the click of heels on the tile floor. His fingers automatically grasp for his gun.

“Relax, hotshot,” she says, her voice echoing around the room at first before settling into something that sounds normal, like something human.

Dean turns to face her and finds her standing in the bright light. She doesn’t smile so much as smirks, as if she knows his deepest, darkest secrets or worse, and that unsettles him. She shows no visible signs of decomposition, skin in tact and auburn brown hair still perfectly, elaborately coiffed. The scarlet red dress she wears fits every curve and line of her body, and the shallow part of Dean laments that all ghosts don’t get to be this attractive.

She takes a step closer. Dean cocks his gun, but she only snubs out her Virginia Slim on the granite countertop, the ash tip extinguishing in a sharp line of smoke, not even looking to the firearm.

Dean doesn’t want to play this game with her. He wants to find Katherine and Delia, but she’s standing in his way, says, “I was hoping you’d come back. You’re—different.”

“I’m different? Different how?” he indulges her, or maybe himself.

“You’re a hunter,” she says, and it’s not every case that a ghost directly calls him out on it. She continues, “But I have a whole new world of things to show you that you’ve never seen before, Dean.”

He kind of hates it when his enemies seem to know who he is or something about him, and speaks with a sneer. “Right. Shining, shimmering. I’ve heard that song before, even lived it once or twice, and I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

A knife from the block on the counter flies past his face and pierces the opposite wall as easily as a dart on a board, and instinct forces him to duck, breath caught in his throat as the blade slices through the air, mere inches from his face.

“I’m not giving you a choice,” she says, and Dean aims, fires. She disappears into a cloud of smoke and dust that glitters in the light as it settles.

“How’s that for choice?” he asks the dust, although he knows that he’s still not the one in control. She makes her presence knows even before she’s able to rematerialize, closing and locking each of the doors as he tries to pass through.

He’s able to access the dining room, finds himself locked inside once he enters. The click of Carmen’s stilettos forebodes their second encounter, and it’s about as friendly as Dean predicts after thoroughly pissing her off. The force of the paranormal seizes control of his body and launches him backward until he crashes inelegantly over the dining room table and up against the far wall. He tries reaching for his gun, but she’s prepared for it this time. It flies out of his grasp and hits the opposite wall where it falls to the floor, useless.

Carmen super-speeds to Dean, keeping him pinned down and pressing the length of her body directly against his. She strokes his face almost tenderly.

“I’ve never seen a man breathe with a soul so dead,” she whispers. “It doesn’t have to be this way. You’ll see.” He assumes she’s talking about killing him, but there’s something lacking in the threat she poses.

He’s still totally and completely at her mercy, though. Not even Dean can deny that much. He remembers the thin lead blade strapped to the inner side of his leg, but he can’t find the strength to reach down for it.

He resolves to himself that this is how he’s going to die. Not against the thing that killed Mom and not against Meg. Not against an angel who gave him stage IV stomach cancer for five lousy minutes or an archangel who wanted to wear his skin to the end of the world. Not against Lucifer of all forms of evil, but to a normal enough ghost as far as normal ghosts go. A hot ghost, but that’s beside the point. The sad thing is that Dean isn’t even all that sad about it.

He attempts a punch based on principle, but it’s half-hearted at best. She catches his fist, squeezing hard enough to bruise, when a pair of familiar hands cover her eyes from behind. Carmen screams, throwing her head back but failing to shake off the force of nature attacking her, one that’s much stronger than she is. Her spirit disappears in an explosion of sparks and cinders that burn themselves out before impact.

Castiel moves back with a hostile grace, leaving Dean to drop down to the floor. His hair is a wreck, his shirt is riding up, and his mouth is hanging open, speechless. He knows that he looks knocked off his ass in more ways than one as Cas just stands there, staring, until he eventually offers a hand to help pick him up.

Dean silently takes it. He has about a million things to say but no words to say them with.

Cas looks exactly the same as he did back in Stull over a year ago, after he’d gotten his wings back and Dean had stupidly asked him if he were God. Dean almost wishes he’d said yes.

He sighs too loudly, rubs his eyes, says, “You know, leave it up to you to show your face again when I’m being attacked by a total babe.” But when Dean looks back up, there’s no one there.

\--

“He thinks you saved him.” It’s an accusation that is a question disguised as a statement.

“I didn’t,” Castiel lies. “The order was to avoid interference among mortals.” Castiel should know. He’d given the order himself.

\--

Dean runs into Katherine on the staircase with Delia close behind, holding her hand tightly. Carmen’s spirit had locked them inside the attic, but Katherine doesn’t have any answers when Dean questions her on a possible motive. She says the ghost had simply vanished, and Dean figures that that was when he’d shown up, interrupting whatever Carmen had in store for them.

Katherine is still trembling as she kneels to look Delia over for the third time, although by Dean’s standards they’re both fine. He suggests that she book a hotel room while she tries to wrap her head around what’s happened, and that’ll give him some extra time to wrap up the case, to make sure that the house is one hundred perfect ghost-free.

After Katherine finishes packing a bag for herself and one for Delia, she meets Dean at the front door.

“So, about ghosts,” she says. “Why do they come back?”

Dean’s witnessed a lot of different responses to that question, and he’s careful with his words when he speaks.

“For different reasons, I guess. Sometimes it’s to resolve unfinished business, and sometimes it’s to exact revenge. Mostly it’s that their souls aren’t at rest for whatever reason, and they just can’t let go.”

“Unfinished business,” Katherine repeats, looking at Delia who’s sitting on the first step just out of earshot. “What if we’re his unfinished business? Why hasn’t he come back?”

Dean knows that she’s talking about her husband now, and he doesn’t have any easy, empty answers to offer her.

He only tells her what he knows firsthand, says, “I wish I knew.”

\--

None of the nicknames that Dean has for Castiel, other than Cas, are particularly nice. He realizes this as he sits in the Impala still parked outside the estate.

Cas. Hard consonant, long vowel.

The thought beats in Dean like a second heartbeat that he might need Castiel for reasons beyond a simple thanks for kicking that ghost’s unholy ass for me. It’s territory he doesn’t want to cross into, so he silences whatever half-formed prayer he’s got hanging on the tip of his tongue before it breathes its first breath.

He gets out of the Impala and circles around to the back of the house, crossing the line of tall oaks and maples, trailing the dogwood and rhododendron, and then cutting across the vast, green expanse of the manicured grass lawn. Once he reaches the end, his eyes trace the descent of the cliff at his feet, his gaze following the steep rock face down to where the waves break against the jagged edge of the land. He looks straight out, and the tide of the sea progressing toward him from the indistinct horizon is dark and blue and endless.

\--

Barcelona, Spain

“What the hell?”

Castiel has since stopped answering that particular rhetorical question.

Dean finds himself sitting inside a dimly lit restaurant across from Cas at a small table set for two. It’s a private spot inside the surrounding chaos of a midnight party scene with their table sectioned off by partitions, mirror-lined columns and gold curtains. A second ago Dean was looking out at the Atlantic from the Rhode Island coastline, and now he’s not even sure he’s in the same state.

He’s been transplanted into a scene of late-night, avant-garde partying in an establishment abuzz with both Spanish and English conversation. Paintings of exotic-looking women decorate crimson walls, accented by gold and black and silver. It’s a sign of fifties art deco, the kitsch of dark yellow lighting reflecting off chrome and mirrors, with splashes of vibrant blues and greens. There’s a romantic charm about it that Dean’s more annoyed by than appreciative of.

“I heard your prayer,” Castiel says, and Dean has to lean closer to hear him over the amalgam of voices and a DJ pumping music through the air like a new pulse.

“Hey, thanks for asking. I’m good, real good. You couldn’t have answered—I don’t know—somewhere on the east coast?”

Castiel glances around, looking about as confused as Dean is angry. “We are on the east coast,” he says, earnestly.

“Of America,” Dean replies, pronouncing every syllable to the letter and attracting the attention of everyone nearby, including a waiter who hadn’t seen them come in and whom Dean quickly dismisses.

Cas’s vexation is directly proportionate to the volume of Dean’s voice. Grimly, he says, “Well, I think you’ve just successfully eliminated all possibility of us passing as discreet tourists. The whole point of this excursion was to blend in—”

“I’m not a tourist,” Dean grits out, interrupting Castiel. “I’m a hostage.”

Castiel levels Dean with a look that pierces through to the center of him. “Your body isn’t suited for extraplanetary travel. This was the closest distance I could manage,” he says, and it’s one of those moments when Castiel speaks and Dean wonders why everyone within a quarter mile radius isn’t concerned that the walls won’t crack at their seams and crumble to their foundations. But Castiel isn’t looking at anyone else. He’s looking only at Dean, inspecting him like he’s actually calculating the time it takes for the oxygen in his blood to get from his lungs to his brain and frowning at Dean’s mortality and the mere fifteen seconds of space exposure he can endure before loss of consciousness occurs.

It’s unsettling.

And then it’s gone. “Besides,” Cas says, his face and whole demeanor softening into something that’s so terribly wide-eyed and human that it compels Dean to suppress the small ache pinching his gut, “the tapas here are said to be phenomenal.”

“All right, all right,” Dean concedes, throwing his arms in the air in temporary resignation. “What gives? Why’d you hotfoot me all the way to—”

“Barcelona,” Cas supplies.

“—Barcelona without so much as giving me a peek at the travel itinerary or, you know, asking me first?”

He answers without further delay. “It’s civil war in Heaven, Dean. What Michael and Lucifer wanted to do to your planet, the angels are doing much worse to their own.”

Dean considers Cas’s gloss on the situation. Apparently it’s Dean’s planet and the angels’ Heaven. It doesn’t go unnoticed that Cas claims ownership over neither, although he’s fighting a war for one and Dean’s not sure where he stands with the other.

It’s his turn to speak, though, so he goes with the most obvious and least affected response. “Yeah, I figured as much. Your side winning or losing?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say the future looks bright, but things are looking less bleak from our perspective as of late,” Cas tells him without much conviction.

It’s all but Dean can do to ask, “How do you factor into it?”

“I’m more of a commander in chief than a sheriff if my understanding of the power hierarchy of government agencies is correct.”

Dean is slightly resentful. “Terrific. So you’re like the president. It’s no wonder you’ve been MIA.”

Cas folds his hands neatly on the table and avoids making eye contact. He changes the subject. “I’m—concerned, Dean. I don’t think you’re making good progress hunting by yourself as you are.”

“Stick to the Oval Office in the blue yonder, Cas. You can shove the rest of your concerns. I don’t want them.”

The conflicted expression on Cas’s face is rebuttal enough. “I would help if I could,” he offers, except he’s not really offering much of anything at all despite his apparent sincerity.

“Didn’t ask for your help anyway,” Dean says, too proud to admit he’d wanted it without having to ask. He hasn’t asked for Castiel’s help since the showdown at Stull, but something more than just his pride holds a grudge for riding in on a white beam of light and rescuing him like a fucking damsel in distress after months and months of zilch. He’d kept his distance when Dean had made a fool of himself begging crossroad demon after crossroad demon to a strike a deal, Sam’s soul for his. He was nowhere to be found when Dean tried bartering with a pagan goddess or when he’d tracked down a warlock who’d lied about knowing how to resurrect Satan. He didn’t lift a finger when Dean had been beaten to a pulp by a wendigo on steroids and was subsequently stranded in the Minnesota wilderness for five of the most miserable days of his life.

Dean is on the verge of asking what’s prompted him to come back now when Castiel turns his head as if he’s listening to something else, a frequency that Dean isn’t equipped to receive.

“I’m afraid this location is no longer safe,” he announces.

It justifies all of Dean’s lone ranger misconceptions about working solo.

“Right. Well, are you going to zap me back in public or—”

But Castiel is gone before Dean’s even reached the end of his sentence.

\--

Dean silently calls Cas every dirty name in the book on the flight back from Barcelona. Humming rock music doesn’t quite do the trick when he’s flying alone.

He gets back to Newport about the same time he left, only now it’s an entire wasted day later. To boot, Cas owes him a whole lot of hard-earned cash totaling five hours worth of straight pool against a Shawn Michaels doppelganger who either wanted to kiss him or kill him after winning each round, for which Dean totally plans on somehow collecting, one way or another.

\--

He owes himself no less than a double Long Island iced tea chased by a shot of tequila before picking up where he left off, and so his destination of choice on the drive back from the estate where a cabbie had so unceremoniously reunited him with his beloved Impala is the first watering hole he sets his sights upon.

He’s secured the bartender’s full attention when someone claims the seat next to his and speaks over him, ordering for him instead.

“Trust me,” she reassures Dean, who’s glaring down at the pink concoction as if it’s personally offended him by talking smack about his car. “This’ll get you where you’re going faster.”

Although he’s doubtful that that much is true, he knows all too well that he’s knocked back far worse than cotton candy in a tall, sleek glass, so he accepts both the drink and the company with the kind of knee-jerk smile reserved only for the bar crowd.

“You been stood up or what?” she asks casually, smiling back tooth for tooth, and his gut reaction is to say yes, although the specifics of his situation with a certain flight-risk angel are grounds for an argument in semantics that he doesn’t have the will or brain power to explain. Not to mention lack of believability.

So he shrugs off the question and shines the spotlight on her instead, and it’s not a bad view, wild hair and red lipstick and dark cat eyes. His immediate perception is that she’s one of those Scarlett Johansson character types, somewhere on the spectrum of gorgeous between classic beauty and biker chick chic, like she might dropkick you to the ground while you’re too preoccupied deluding yourself into thinking that you might actually score her number. Dean’s not sure if he’s up to the challenge of chatting up Natasha Romanoff tonight, but she seems into him enough and no one else appears to be on her radar, so he lets the current of the conversation catch him adrift and lead him where it may.

He learns that her name is Donna and, after one taste of her mystery drink, Dean’s convinced that the girl knows a thing or two about mixed beverages and correcting errors in judgment based on the color of the booze in relation to its content. It’s sweet, and although the flavor works to disguise the alcohol, he knows it’s plenty there. By the third sip, its satisfying dull throb has already begun to coat his synapses, just as she’d reassured. He toasts to her, and to himself, and silently to not thinking about every real friend he’s ever made, almost all of whom are now dead or better off without him.

It’s ten minutes before he’s got her rolling up her shirt and showcasing the spread of her tattoos in addition to the ones already visible along her arms. The more discreet the location, the more taboo the subject matter. There’s some sort of phoenix creature flying up the length of her back, or falling down it depending on the interpretation, that backdrops a stylized scroll design, the text of which Dean recognizes as Latin but can’t interpret. He can’t help but laugh to himself a little at how these rocker types think they’re being edgy when really they’re dabbling into the real deal occult-level stuff, but he supposes that’s where the appeal originates and to each their own.

As for himself, he avoids the usual questions about who he is, where he’s from, and what he likes to do for that unknown activity recognized by the general population as fun. He does reveal that he’s an agent in town investigating a case, and Donna is instantly and thoroughly intrigued. She’s leaning in so close to Dean that he thinks she might lick him, but she doesn’t. When she asks about the progress he’s making, he defaults to, “it’s confidential,” which is a convenient, credible, and easy way out.

He attempts to transition from that topic to the next and somehow finds himself spinning off onto a tangent about workplace dress codes, on which he surprisingly has a great deal of firsthand experience with to speak of even if it’s by way of impersonation, when he comes out with the most dreadful sentence he possibly could have conceived.

“See, I have this friend,” he begins, and it’s clearly a point of no return as far as conversation starters go when suddenly he’s in the midst of describing Castiel’s permanent attire, likening his wardrobe of fixed variables to Peter Falk’s Columbo minus the cigar but with twice as many incidents of social misunderstandings. By now Dean has some drink in him, and so he recounts a civilian-friendly version of when his former partner in anti-crime reappeared after an extended leave of absence to save his bacon in a tough spot, only to disappear again without so much as an adios or even the desire to collect a proper thanks for his efforts. Then he explains how Castiel whisked him off to some distant getaway, which he vehemently denies was a date when Donna inquires, and abruptly left him there alone. Duty calls. Dean gets that more than most people, but there’s duty and then there’s leaving someone in the lurch, high and dry.

Donna considers what he says, and then draws the most general conclusion from it that she can. “You should talk to him.”

Dean is instantly dismissive. “Tried it. The guy’s not exactly the world’s greatest conversationalist.”

“Who is?” she snaps back. “Sounds to me like you guys communicate just fine. You’re just ignoring what’s being left unsaid is all. You know, between the lines, I mean.”

Dean leans back and takes her in again, and is immediately overcome with regret over the past half hour or so. He’s single, attractive, and currently seated across from a stunningly beautiful woman who seems interested in him. Meanwhile he can’t keep his mouth shut about Cas, like Donna’s some relationship expert or self-help guru whom he expects to receive words of wisdom from, or Yoda-isms, or pithy observations about general truths, like “the secret to getting there is to know where you’re going” and other stupid maxims he once read in a book he still insists belonged to Sam.

He thinks he even might’ve mentioned Cas’s eye color at one point, and he doesn’t know why that didn’t send her running as fast as she possibly can in the opposite direction.

“Well, I happen to have a friend, too,” Donna starts, jabbing him playfully in the shoulder. “Real lone wolf kind of fellow, always on the road. Then one day—bam. Got a place of his own, someone special to share it with. Still drives his old car, though. Chevy Chevelle or something muscle like that. Carries his gun, too. Not much else has changed about him, only I see him smile every once in a while, and it’s not a bad look on him. I think it’s called growing up.”

“I think it’s called being domesticated,” Dean amends, and although he’s drunk, he isn’t stupid. “You’re just shitting me, though. You saw me pull up out back, didn’t you?”

She laughs. “Guilty as charged. More like I heard you pull up, though.”

The car enthusiast in Dean can’t help but correct her. “Then you should know it’s an Impala and not a Chevelle. Mine’s bigger and longer, for future reference.”

“Duly noted,” she says, and then agrees to one more round, this time on him. By the time he’s downed the last tall glass of sin, his head is spinning faster than a top. All his thoughts leftover from sobriety have long since spun out.

After he writes down a cell phone number that will be out of service in no more than a few weeks, he drags himself outside, catching the attention of a group of smokers lingering at the door and pushing past them despite their mock offense. He then stumbles into the backseat of the Impala where he relinquishes his grip on consciousness until sunrise.

\--

May 2010  
Douglas County, Kansas

He’s done this before, and it went well. It went well, meaning that it resulted in him being ripped to shreds by hellhounds and then spending what seemed like decades in the Pit. But it worked. Moments after performing this simple ritual—a shallow burial of a handful of objects at the center of a crossroads—Sam was breathing again. Sam was alive. It was all that mattered to Dean then, and it’s all that matters to him now.

“Are you kidding me?” the demon laughs in his face, teasing him with the prelude to a kiss that she’ll never give. “None of us are stupid enough to go against Lucifer, Dean, however little you may think of us. Forget it.” She gives him an apologetic look that’s anything but sorry before disappearing into thin air as if she’d never been summoned at all. Dean’s left standing there alone with a demon’s affected pity and little else.

He tries again in Oklahoma. This one informs him that not even last season’s size Dean haute couture for Michael is worth crossing Lucifer. No demon will deal.

He drives further south and tries again in Texas. He almost gets shot by a farmer who catches him trespassing at a crossroads bordering his property.

He tries a different tactic in Louisiana, where he finds a kid who’s attempting to summon Satan. It turns out to be just another Joe Blow in eyeliner with jet black hair from a box and a couple of pseudo Latin incantations that couldn’t pull a rabbit from a hat.

He changes direction and drives north through Mississippi. Then Alabama. Then Florida and Georgia. He saves twenty-six lives by the time he reaches Tennessee, but none of them are Sam.

\--

Angelic mojo trumps all, he knows, but that’s not the point. Before Dean gives Katherine the green light to return home, he finds out where Carmen is buried and decides to burn her bones anyway. It’ll feel good, the familiarity of a salt and burn. The sting of the lit match hitting his nose, getting dirt under his fingernails that’ll be there for days. He likes working with his hands, always has. He likes the feeling of having accomplished something afterward.

Once it’s dark, he sets to work locating Carmen’s grave, singing Phil Collins without shame as he digs up the coffin. He’s making fairly decent progress, which is par for the course for a pair of wings and trench coat to ruin.

“You keep doing that and I’m gonna start taking it personally,” Dean says, angrily.

The comment goes unacknowledged. “The case. Isn’t it done?”

“Let me explain something, Cas,” Dean starts in, staking the shovel into the ground and leaning his weight on it like it’s a lectern. “When you pick someone up, it’s part of the social contract of planet Earth to drop them back off again.” He has a brief but vivid flashback to the flight from Barcelona, which he swears to himself is what gets him sweating more than the dig.

“I apologize,” Cas says, contrite. “There wasn’t time.”

“Wasn’t time?” Dean’s voice spikes. He abandons the shovel and steps forward toward Cas. “Right. Like those twelve or whatever months I didn’t hear a peep out of you or nothing. Right. No time. Got it.”

No one speaks for a moment. Castiel stands as still as the statues that surround them. Dean clears his throat, rubs at his temple. He hears the words that Donna had said to him that he hadn’t remembered until now. It’s like piecing together a puzzle, how she’d pointed out what it’s like to communicate with someone without using words. He realizes that he’s staring at Cas like he’s trying to piece him together or maybe take him apart, and he just can’t snap himself out of it.

Not with Castiel looking how he does, like there’s a storm brewing inside him just below the surface, and all his purported calmness has been a facade.

Cas is the first one to break the silence. “Dean, this is serious. No one can know I’m here.” The determination in his voice is resolute and strong. It charges the air and makes Dean’s skin prickle how it does preceding rainclouds and thunderheads, even if the sky is tranquil up above.

“Yeah. You made that abundantly clear during our last little rendezvous. Man, I’m starting to feel like the other woman here or something.” Dean barrels on before Cas can respond with something more than a head tilt and squinting. “Just tell me what’s going on up there. Since when did Heaven ground all outbound flights to Earth?”

“You mean why aren’t angels supposed to fly to Earth anymore?” Cas waits for Dean to nod before continuing. “Things in Heaven are touch and go at the moment.”

Dean huffs because that explains absolutely nothing. Then he considers what Castiel isn’t saying, and he kind of hates Donna for every word she said to him last night.

“You’re really not supposed to be here, are you?” It’s more of an observation than a question, like the impact of Castiel’s illicit presence on Earth is only just hitting Dean now.

Cas responds anyway. “No, I’m not.”

“You’ve done a fine job obeying that order so far,” Dean snorts. Then he considers exactly what Castiel’s disobedience has meant for him in the past.

“You don’t understand,” Cas begins anew. “The angels. They’re starting to listen to me. I’m gaining authority, and Raphael—”

Dean interrupts because he’s still doing that thing where his mouth opens before his brain catches up.

“Right. Because you’re the exception.”

Castiel stares at him with eyes that could move a mountain if he tried.

“No, Dean,” he says very slowly. “That was always you.”

Dean feels as if all the air has been sucked from his lungs. He would’ve preferred the anger of a hurricane to the quiet devastation of its aftermath.

He coughs a little to chase away the cat that’s got his tongue, says, “They’re listening, huh? Well, that’s just swell.”

“It’s progress, of sorts. They’re beginning to listen, at least. Isn’t that a good thing?” Cas asks him with the most hopeful expression he’s seen since the search for God seemed like it might be a success.

“Oh, it’s great, Cas,” Dean says with no amount of sincerity in his voice. “So, what, you’re like Aristotle or something now? Converting angels from the Dark Side with logic and reason?”

“I’ve opened up a public forum among supporters, but teaching millennia-old beings to change their ways is to trek a long and arduous path.” Dean tries to imagine Cas as Moses leading his people, but all he can come up with is Cas in a cap and gown giving a graduation speech at a podium. It’s a far cry from the blazing image of a war general rounding up his troops before riding into battle, which he knows is more accurate.

“Great. Because that’s worked out so well in the past. Asking people nicely in the middle of a regime change.”

And there’s that gap between them again that expands under a certain kind of silence. Dean doesn’t know if either one of them can bridge it, wouldn’t know where to begin even if he could. What he does know is that he could never understand the mechanics of angelic warfare no matter how much Castiel tries explaining it to him. He can’t even listen to Castiel’s true voice without his eardrums bursting. That’s how different they are.

“I’m doing everything I can to fix things. Trust me, Dean. I am.” But Dean can’t put trust in what’s being asked of him. Not really. He couldn’t trust his brother not to leave him in the end. He couldn’t trust his dad to tell him the truth about Sam. He couldn’t trust that his mother would still be there when he awoke in a strange place the morning after a nightmare he would never truly wake up from. Couldn’t trust himself to save the whole damn bunch of them. They’re all dead, every one of them except for him.

And Cas.

Then it hits him in a roundabout way what Castiel has been trying to do all along. Dean’s first impulse is to issue an ultimatum, the same one that he and his dad had both given Sam. It was the worst scenario imaginable.

And Cas’s eyes are so bright and endless in the dark that Dean loses himself in them for a moment, like if he asked Cas to take him back to Barcelona to do it all over again or to London or Paris this time instead, he would oblige him, just like that. And if Dean said stay, Cas just might. But Dean would never ask, and so Cas won’t get the chance to answer.

“Seems like you’re needed elsewhere, then,” is all Dean says.

“I can stay,” Cas dithers, “at least for a little while longer.”

Dean likes clean breaks. Anything less only prolongs the inevitable.

“You’ve got your orders. You should follow them.” Dean grits the words out through a squared jaw, giving Cas his best poker face. “Whatever strings you’ve got here, I think you ought to cut them loose.”

It feels like being at the crest of a wave before it breaks.

“You’re probably right,” Cas agrees, and it’s the least vindicated Dean’s ever felt.

Castiel’s stare is enough of an emotional farewell without any words spoken at all, and he vanishes in a blink before Dean can crack a joke to lighten the mood or lay into him again to make it angrier. Anything but what it is, how it leaves Dean feeling. He feels disembodied, as if Castiel had taken all sense of gravity and direction with him when he’d gone.

But Dean doesn’t float away, and he doesn’t fall apart. He digs. Lights a match. Watches in silence as the bones turn to smoke and ash.

\--

It’s morning by the time the fire’s burned out, and Dean calls Katherine to tell her that she’s free to return home again. When he gets back to his own motel room, the shoddy, flat double mattress appears to be more like a luxurious king size feather bed to his sleep-deprived eyes and aching arms and back. He belly flops onto the center of it only to be met by stabbing pain, which forces him to jump back onto his feet, cursing and shouting. He sees the shiny little tiara that felt like a mini pitchfork to his side and lifts up his shirt. There’s a mark but no blood, and he can’t for the life of him remember leaving the stupid thing in the middle of the bed like that.

He’d completely forgotten he’d even had it at all. He picks it up, contemplating it, and reckons that maybe Delia shouldn’t give up on her princess dreams just yet, but that if she does, then she most definitely should not bequeath them to him.

After barely putting a dent into some long overdue hours of sleep, Dean drives to the estate where Katherine and Delia have since returned after being declared spirit-free and perfectly habitable once again. He offers the tiara to Katherine along with a slightly sheepish grin. She’s nonchalant about it, though, and greets him as if she’s been expecting his arrival even without him having called ahead.

“Your partner only got here about fifteen minutes ago,” she remarks.

“My what?” he fires back, caught completely off his guard. Only something terribly wrong would’ve brought Cas back after the kind of exit he’d made, and so soon, too.

“Yeah. She’s upstairs.” Katherine opens the door wider, signaling for him to come inside.

Dean echoes her own words back to her, panic rippling through him on the inside. Unless Cas has starting dropping into a different vessel, which would be all sorts of weird, Dean’s doubtful it’s his sometimes-favorite angel who’s posing as his partner of all things. He forces the thought of Sam out of his head, refusing to submit to impossibility and false hope. Then he considers that just because the one ghost on his radar is gone doesn’t mean that the case has been solved. He never did discover Carmen Spencer’s true motive and what it was that brought her back in the first place.

With his gun drawn and his guard fully on, he climbs the staircase up to the attic where he discovers a familiar face holding a small, wooden box.

“I guess I forgot about this one,” Donna says, lifting her hair with one hand to reveal a familiar tattoo, an anti-possession pentagram in all its firebrand glory ablaze on the back of her neck.

Dean’s incensed with himself as he tries to figure out exactly how she got the one-up on him, at how he stupidly couldn’t shake her advice while he talked to Cas last night, and that she probably tailed him, leading her right to Katherine’s front door. But it’s the box in her conspicuously gloved hands that has him really concerned, with what looks like all four sides engraved with markings that look similar to ones that have spelled trouble for him in the past.

Donna reaches inside the box and pulls out the weight of something heavy, and Dean instantly knows that the object she’s cradling in her gloved palm is no ordinary crystal ball. Dean half expects her to transform into a white-robed wizard and summon the Dark Lord Sauron. Instead she throws him a curveball, although really it’s more of an underhanded pass. It’s a cheap trick, one that Dean himself has pulled before, but it works. He catches the crystal ball on reflex. From the instant his fingertips touch its smooth quartz surface, his vision goes black, and his whole body feels swallowed whole by darkness.

\--

“Is he still breathing?”

“I don’t know. I think so. You check him this time.”

“Me? Do I look like a doctor to you? You do it.”

“I knew we shouldn’t have played all eighteen holes in this kind of heat.”

“Our little brother’s going to kill us if we’ve broken his—”

“Dean?” a familiar voice breaks through the rest of unknowns. It starts out distant, but it becomes closer, clearer, more grounded by the syllable each time it speaks his name.

He feels hands shaking him, patting him, and then tapping at his cheek. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself blinded by the light of the brightest sun he’s seen in days. He’s burning up under it, sweating bullets like a glass of Coke in the heat of July, and his mouth has a hot taste like stale chewing gum that makes him choke and cough up nothing.

But none of that matters because he sees whose hands are there pulling him back to consciousness, whose face is right there in front of his own.

“Sam?” His breath rasps in his throat, but it’s been far too long since he’s spoken his brother’s name aloud. He can’t think of one good reason as to why he’s collapsed on the ground with Sam hunched over him and blocking out the sun, his long hair falling into his face and his arms strong and careful, if not a little awkward, too.

“Dean?” Sam asks again, quieter this time, voice low and disbelieving. For a moment, Dean doesn’t understand what’s happened. Then it all comes screaming back to him. The estate on the cliff, the chandelier. Katherine and Delia Mandeville. Donna and the box. Donna’s tattoos.

“Fuck, not again,” Dean rasps, almost weary. “I really hope you’re a hunter this time so that you don’t stare at me like I’m nuts when I start talking about a djinn.”

“What? Uh, there’s no djinn here, Dean.” Sam rocks back onto his heels and looks down at him as if he’s just sprouted five new heads. Dean reacts, sits up too fast and feels the tilt of the Earth spin with him.

“Yeah, right. That’s exactly what Dream Sam would say.”

It’s his best guess that he’s lost somewhere deep in the heart of Neverland, but this almost seems too visceral to be a dream. For one thing, his head is pounding a beat his subconscious could never achieve. But he writes it off as something all dreamers foolishly believe before awakening, that what they’re dreaming is the real deal.

He allows himself a single moment of comfort while looking at Sam, whose face he never thought he’d see again in this lifetime.

“What’s happening to him?” asks one of the mystery voices standing in the background. It reminds Dean how vulnerable he is in this position, so he stands before his brain can tell him to slow down, despite the waves of dizziness causing his vision to swim.

“Who the hell are you?” Dean asks the guy, who’s about a foot shorter than he is and dressed in khakis. It’s not the least threatening getup Dean’s ever seen, but it’s close.

Then he notices what he himself is wearing, and it’s slightly terrifying. Plaid shorts that are an abomination for their length alone, a polo shirt that he admits could be worse, and a pair of cleats disguised as dancing shoes that have both wingtips and tassels on them.

He turns back to Sam, asks, “And why the hell am I dressed like Tiger Woods?”

No one answers. He looks from confused face to confused face, and then at his surroundings, at the endless, rolling green hills. There’s a golf club at his feet, and he has the sneaking suspicion that it belongs to him. He looks around again, waiting for the truth to reveal itself. A flash of tattoos, the swish of a dark cloak. It has to be a djinn. There’s no other explanation for it.

\--

After some negotiation with Sam to let him steer one of the golf carts back to the parking lot, Dean allows his little brother to drive him home.

The first and most obvious indication to Dean that he’s dreaming is that Sam’s alive, but surely the most ridiculous red flag is the prospect that he has a home other than the one he’s been driving back and forth through the forty-eight contiguous states in, carrying nothing more than what’s in his wallet and in his trunk.

At least he knows how to waste what’s keeping him trapped here. He needs two things. Lamb’s blood and something that’s sharp enough to kill and made of silver.

Meanwhile, Sam’s busy side-eyeing the hell out of him from the driver’s seat.

“Who were those guys back there?” It’s an easier question to start with rather than asking him to explain why the fuck he isn’t dead or, worse than that, trying to convince him that none of this is even real at all.

“You mean Ephraim, Narcariel, and Barnabas? Yeah, those are your golfing buddies.”

“Golfing buddies?” Dean grimaces. “Why do they sound like they stepped off a page from the Old Testament?”

“They’re angels, Dean. Or at least they were.”

“And what’re you supposed to be? Zombie Jesus?” Dean asks because patience isn’t his strong suit, least of all when it comes to Sam.

He doesn’t remember Sam’s hair ever being quite this long.

Sam stares back, incredulous and a little irritated. Dean kind of wants to punch the look right off his face. It’s like rubbing salt in his wounds to look at this Sam, who’s so alive and well that it’s completely unreal.

“What’s the last thing you remember, Dean?”

Dean doesn’t want to answer him. He remembers a lot of things he’d sooner forget if he could.

“You’re dead. Cas is AWOL ninety-five percent of the time and a dick during the rest. Life pretty much sucks ass. How’s that for reality?” Then it hits him that he might be able to learn something from all this. Before Sam can speak, Dean continues. “Your turn now. Just tell me one thing. How’d you get out?”

“Wait a sec.” Sam peers at him through his peripheral vision. “You still think I’m in the cage with Lucifer?”

“Who busted you out, Sammy?” Dean asks as if his entire world depends upon it. It kind of does.

Sam pauses before giving his answer.

“Cas,” he says at length. He pronounces the name very carefully.

\--

The Impala pulls to a stop in front of a concrete and brick door built into the side of a dirt hill. Dean’s reluctant, but he follows Sam inside. Sam calls the bunker their inheritance and slights it as headquarters, but one step further tells Dean otherwise.

The balcony commands a view of the circular room below, and Dean follows Sam down the staircase and into a different era marked by bold geometric shapes and rich colors. The stretch of dark wood tables and the endless sea of bookshelves are enough to give Sam’s hitherto top ten favorite libraries a run for their money.

A noise coming from an adjacent room distracts him from the sight of a katana blade on display, and then Cas is filling up the room with his presence and nearly displacing everything else. He’s barefoot, wearing dark sweatpants and a plain white t-shirt.

He watches Dean with a fond and serious expression, a certain gentleness that Dean doesn’t quite understand.

“Hey, Cas.”

“Dean?” Cas studies him as he comes closer in proximity. “What happened? You look terrible.” Dean feels like he’s being examined under a microscope.

Before Dean can react, Cas places his hands on his shoulders, his fingertips digging ever so slightly into the cotton of Dean’s shirt. Dean swallows thickly, leaning back ever so slightly.

But then Cas tilts his head like he doesn’t quite recognize what he sees. He steps back, slow and careful. Each movement is fluid and precise and intentional as he repositions himself in front of Dean now at arm’s length.

“What year are you from?” Cas asks, clearly on edge.

“2011.”

“Welcome to the future. It’s 2016,” Sam pipes up, suddenly bursting the Castiel-filled bubble Dean’s become lost in.

Dean doesn’t understand how he could possibly wind up spending his days off golfing with ex-angels or living part-time in a bunker stuck in the thirties, but the rest of it is starting to make sense to him. He can’t deny that he quite literally had a crystal ball thrown in his direction. Whatever magic it transmitted must’ve transported him to this fool’s paradise he’s witnessing firsthand. He still tripped down the rabbit hole. It’s just not the one he’d initially assumed it was, but unfortunately this one already seems harder to crawl his way out of.

He takes a look at one of the shelves. If he’d had any indication that this place was straight out of a time when bread was still ten cents a loaf, liquor was contraband, and entertainment was centered around the radio before, he’s certain of it now. He’s not sure if he can picture himself elbows deep in parlor games while listening to a recording of a twenty-three-hour Orson Welles broadcast or Franklin Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” but as far as anything he’s ever inherited goes, it could be a lot worse.

He realizes that the record collection featuring Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington is about as normal as this place gets. It starts out kind of boring with Dead Sea Scroll fragments and biblical manuscripts written in languages that Dean can’t read, but that Sam would surely cream himself over. Then it’s the good stuff, the real treasure trove the bunker has to offer. Ancient weaponry categorized according to size specifications and region. The Sword of Kladenets, the Sword of Attila. The Axe of Perun. Bidents, tridents, and a thunderbolt simulation device named Z-2. The Shield of Achilles and Aphrodite’s golden girdle. He vows to punch his future self in the face if he ever dares to try it on. Odin’s Gungnir is smaller than he thought it’d be, and Loki’s javelin that Hod was tricked into killing Baldr with still has the blood of a Norse god on it, which is pretty badass in Dean’s esteem.

“Who the hell were these people?” he asks Sam, turning a particularly heavy blade over in his hands. “You called this our inheritance.”

Dean can see the protest on Sam’s face before it reaches his voice, and he almost regrets asking.

“I think it’s better you don’t know too much about all of this before you’re supposed to.”

“And why’s that? So I don’t go back and screw it all up?”

“No,” Sam insists. “So you don’t get yourself killed trying to change all the bad things that have happened that are just out of our control.”

It’s a line meant to placate him, and every Sam from all dimensions should know that that kind of rhetoric only makes Dean angrier.

“Sam the soothsayer, huh? Whatever happened to free will and the future being uncertain? Controlling your own destiny. Life can be anything you want it to be, and all the rest of that bullshit you used to believe in.”

“No one’s saying the future’s been set in stone, but I also know that this is real. Look, think of it as a time loop. For the Dean we know, this has already happened. I’m not going to put up with you groaning your way through quantum gravity and special relativity for the second time. The first was bad enough, so you’re just going to have to trust us on this one. Or not. It’s your call.”

Dean’s still not convinced, but he doesn’t see the point in arguing if he doesn’t have to because, real Sam or not, he knows the look that Sam’s giving him in spades. Sam’s not going to change his mind no matter what comes out of Dean’s mouth next.

“I don’t suppose there’s any lowdown on crystal balls in this joint?” he asks instead. Sam’s face brightens.

“Actually, there’s tons. That stuff about crystal healing gemstones is complete crap, FYI, but certain crystals are tied to some pretty heavy magic. You’ve actually documented the use of one in particular dating back from the New Kingdom period of ancient Egypt. I think it resurfaced during a tomb raid.”

“Hold up. I document this stuff, too? Do I even hunt anymore?”

“Yeah, of course. Of course,” Sam reassures a very concerned Dean. “Hunting’s still our main gig, but we run things a little differently now.”

“A little?” Dean repeats incredulously, the look on his face almost comical in disgust at the fact that his future self becomes what is essentially a freaking academic. “Now that’s got to be the biggest understatement of the last five years. So, what happens, exactly? One touch of Lara Croft’s crystal ball and it’s Miller time?”

“No, you’ve got to know what you’re doing for it to work. But if you do, it takes clairvoyance to a whole new level. It’s kind of like scrying in IMAX 3D or something, but I think you already get the picture.”

Dean more than gets it. He’s starting to accept what’s going on here even if he won’t say as much in so many words.

“Yeah. Lucky me. Tell me something, though. Because that bitch sent me here on purpose. Who’s Donna?” he tries, a hunch telling him that she might’ve stuck around.

Sam sighs, stalling, obvious that he doesn’t want to tell Dean any of the details. “A friend of ours. A hunter. She’s also part of the Men of Letters,” he discloses at length.

“Part of what?”

“Person,” Cas corrects from where he’s standing on the sidelines.

“Oh, right.” Sam apologizes for reasons Dean doesn’t know. “We’re working on changing the name. Men of Letters. It is kind of sexist.”

But Dean still has no idea what any of it actually means.

“As fascinating as all of this is,” he says, “please tell me there’s a way to get back to my own time. And more importantly, to my old wardrobe.”

“Oh, right. Guess I should’ve mentioned this earlier. The crystal’s magic wears off once you find something in your future that makes you genuinely happy, kind of like a longtime wish or desire that’s been fulfilled. Allowing just anybody to see into the future presents all kinds of problems, obviously, but the magic involved in the crystal ball itself is relatively harmless as far as cursed objects go. So that’s the deal.”

Dean grimaces. He’s less than pleased after hearing that explanation. Leaving this place just got a little more complicated than he’d expected. It’s much easier when he knows what he’s looking for, what he should be chasing after. Even if the pursuit is difficult, he likes to face his challenges directly, at least when it comes to the hunt. He can’t imagine what would satisfy him enough to do the trick, and how some stupid crystal ball could possibly know what that might be when he isn’t even sure he’d know it himself.

Sam tries to mask his amusement, but he invariably fails. He tells Dean that he’s done this before, and that it all worked out with no harm done in the end. “Don’t worry. You see what you’re meant to, and then you can click your heels and say the magic words three times in a row.”

Dean isn’t laughing.

“You don’t actually have to click your heels,” Cas reassures, completely deadpan. At least some things never change, Dean thinks, although he doesn’t feel so comforted.

“Do you remember Dean ever mentioning anything about any of this before?” Sam asks Cas in turn, who’s face goes pale under the spotlight.

“I don’t know,” Cas falters, already backing out of the room. “I’m not sure.” He disappears before either brother has the chance to pursue the question.

\--

Dean, wanting answers, follows Cas into a kitchen that’s fit for a professional chef.

“You gonna dish about what you remember, or do I need to drag it out of you?” he asks, although his persistence fades, his attention completely stolen by his surroundings. There are stacks upon stacks of cookbooks on the counters, along with some kitchen appliances that could probably pass for contemporary weaponry in the bunker’s archive.

“There’s really nothing to dish or drag,” Cas sighs. “Newport was memorable. That’s all.”

From Dean’s current perspective, which he admits is relative at the moment, Newport doesn’t seem like anything worth remembering so far down the road. He’s glad that Katherine and Delia survived even if he almost didn’t, and that they aren’t too traumatized after their close encounter with an evil sorceress who’d come back from the dead. But it doesn’t seem like a case that would stand out to him when compared to all the others he’s worked in the past—like preventing Armageddon, for instance.

But that was then. Dean’s first priority now is to get back to where he belongs. He has about a thousand wishes he’d long to come true, but the problem is that he keeps most of them secret, even to himself more than half of the time. Besides, he can’t imagine that anything he’d find here would have any sort of viable consequences for him in the real world. Sam may appear to be alive within the sanctuary of the bunker, but the reality is that Dean’s little brother is still locked inside a cage somewhere with the Devil.

His next hunch is that this somehow has something to do with the Mandeville family of two, but he seems so far removed from them that he doesn’t know where he’d even begin if that were the case. He’s not sure that Sam would even let him have a crack at the laptop to check up on their whereabouts in 2016 if he’d wanted to. In fact, Sam’s probably already switched off the internet connection since Dean’s never been good at asking for permission in the first place anyway.

It almost seems as if he and Cas don’t want him to find out what some inanimate crystal object thinks that he ought to know about himself down the line, and that makes Dean a little nervous. He half expects the angel from his own timeline to come waltzing in to bail him out of a future that’s come too soon, but he knows that he and Cas didn’t exactly leave off on the best of terms when he decided to send him straight back to a warzone not knowing if or when he’d see him again. Still, they’ve always been able to repair the damages done to their relationship, which had begun with Dean stabbing him in the chest for the kill. They’ve fought in back alleyways, but they’ve laughed in them just as hard, too. Castiel had once pulled Dean from an alternate timeline because he’d said they’d had an appointment. Dean clearly remembers himself standing there on the street, pulled out of a dystopia by one of the few pairs of hands he could still count on in the world. That was when he’d told Cas never to change, but he isn’t certain that’s exactly what he’d meant. Cas had been falling even back then.

It’s a strange concept, worrying about someone who’s off fighting a war among angels while at the same time he’s standing right here in from of him in human form, looking strange in his sweatpants and his hair more disheveled than it ever has before. But the fact of the matter is that Cas is here; he’s still with him in the future, and that has to count for something. Instinct tells Dean that this Cas has answers for him. He just needs to know how to ask the right questions. Something important must have happened in Newport, at least important enough for this Castiel to mention it now, and Dean’s determined to find out what it is.

“Yeah, right. Right after I took care of that ghost, I got played by this Chick of Letters or whatever you wanna call it. Truly worth remembering. Not.”

“You mean after I took care of the ghost. Look, Dean. It won’t be long before you’re right back to where you belong. You can just sit quietly in your room to pass the time until then if that would make you feel better.”

“Did you just send me to my room?” Dean glances at Cas in disbelief, then does a double take. “Wait. I have a room?”

Cas nods in a way that strikes Dean as unusual, and then it dawns on him that there’s something about this future version of Cas that seems different. At first he can’t tell if it’s the clothes or the setting or what, but then he thinks he hits upon what’s been throwing him off.

“You’re not an angel anymore, are you?” The words come out of Dean’s mouth softer than he intended them.

When Cas doesn’t answer, Dean takes that as a yes.

“I don’t get it. You were basically running the show the last time I checked.” Dean’s not quite sure he’d really call it running the show if that meant clandestine meetings with his sometimes-favorite human in foreign countries, but the message was always clear. Castiel’s priority was Heaven, as it should’ve been. He can’t imagine what would’ve caused that to change short of losing the war, and he doubts that such an outcomes would’ve left Cas standing in front of him looking as content as he does. It’s true that he looks pensive, but he doesn’t look regretful at all.

“Yes, I suppose I was running the show.” Cas shrugs off the thought of it. “But that was a long time ago, and it’s a very long story to tell what’s happened since. The Tablets of God were a whole fiasco, among other things.”

Even without the fury of his grace, Cas still stares into Dean in a way that stops any oxygen from reaching his lungs. It’s heady and disorienting, and he briefly feels as if he might be drowning. In a strange sort of way, the feeling almost stabilizes him as something familiar from his own time.

“Why don’t I make us some coffee? I think we could both use a cup right about now.” Dean knows that Cas is changing the subject on purpose, but he’s more than okay with it. He watches as Cas uses a grinder to make grounds out of fresh coffee beans, and he stares like it’s the most peculiar thing in the world for him to see.

“Just coffee?” Dean jokes, trying to make light of the situation. “Don’t tell me we’ve gone sober, too.” He cracks open a cabinet as if he’s searching for something stronger than caffeine, but he still keeps a steady eye on Cas, who places his fresh coffee grounds into the bottom of the glass cylinder like a coffee connoisseur, clearly a man who’s done this for years now.

“It could’ve been worse, you know,” Cas says, ignoring the levity of Dean’s question. “You could’ve woken up to a much more dire situation.”

“Like what?” Dean holds his arms out and looks down at himself with distaste. “I’m wearing shorts. And tassels.”

“Like on a hunt, for instance. Or in flagrante delicto. Be thankful.”

While Dean’s still stupidly poking around the kitchen cabinets in search of anything even slightly alcoholic, he comes across something that’s practically in the same league as porn to him. He cracks open the first in a collection of cookbooks, and it’s the answer to a pie lover’s every prayer.

He looks over at Cas, who’s absently adjusting the waistband to his sweatpants while waiting on the coffee to brew, and then back to the cookbooks again, biting his lip.

He continues flipping through, mouth all but watering for tarte tatin, when the hot sizzle of bacon hitting a skillet snaps him out of it. The sound of it sizzling sings like music to his appetite.

He turns around to face Cas, who’s watching him with an intensity that speaks a language angelic power doesn’t know.

“So easily you’re seduced by pie.”

“Absolutely, and I make no apologies for it.” Dean grins, making a clicking noise in his cheek.

Cas laughs, short and quiet. Says, “That’s true. You don’t.” He turns around and flips each strip of bacon steaming hot in the pan.

“I don’t make this as good as you,” he admits with his back still turned, “but the Dean of 2011 hasn’t yet perfected the bacon guacamole grilled cheese with melted jack and cheddar, so I have the clear advantage here.” So Dean’s future self cooks. He supposes the steady diet of blood, sweat, and tears that comes along with being a hunter could benefit from something homemade. If the recipes he’s found are any indication, he thinks it’s safe to say that a bacon lattice crust goes better with everything, bourbon apple pie jumping to the top of that list once he glimpses a picture for it.

In this moment, Dean decides that he’ll sit and eat when it’s ready. He decides that if he’s going to be stuck here, that he’ll grin and bear it for whatever amount of time remains undetermined on the clock. The life he lives here, at least so far, seems easy enough to deal with. Far better than his own present. Besides, he’s been starving ever since he’d woken up by the eighteenth hole, and he’d give just about anything to fill his stomach with some sugar and grease.

He scarfs down the sandwich and a leftover slice of cherry pie from the fridge, trying his best to ignore the way Cas stares at him while he eats.

\--

While it’s not exactly everyday that someone gets to take a peek at the legendary Shield of Achilles or the very garment that the Greek goddess of love put on to make herself simply irresistible to anyone who dared lay eyes upon her, it’s what Dean finds in his own bedroom that truly surprises him. The prospect of having a place to call his own is kind of like imagining himself trying to build a foundation on the ocean floor, but he’s genuinely curious, if not slightly terrified, about what he might discover there.

The small weapons collection mounted on the walls earns a slight nod of approval along with a single crude-looking axe that would certainly have its fair share of memories to tell him if it could, but it’s the photograph on display on his desk that he gravitates to first. It’s of himself and his mother, whose bright eyes and gentle smile still make his bones ache for a place that hasn’t been his to call home in so long a time that it’s become more like a dream or fairytale to him now than a distant memory from his own childhood.

Almost more surreal to him than that are the few photos, most of which are touristy shots of him and Cas, tacked to the wall above his bed. There’s one in front of the Fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas and one of them standing in front of Niagara Falls. There’s one of them with Sam taken on the Freedom Trail in Massachusetts, and next to that is a shot of the three of them at a Renaissance Faire, complete with each of them in full costume. He takes one of himself and Cas smiling into the camera off the wall and stares at it for a very long time before tacking it back up again, swallowing dryly at the understanding it provides.

Although he usually sleeps in his regular clothes most nights in normal time, he can’t help but wade through the closet under the pretense of searching for something more comfortable than what he currently has on. He wonders if half the stuff he finds in there is even his or not. He first finds a few two-button suits that at least look less cheap than the ones he was sporting when he was twenty-six. Then he recognizes a few familiar items hanging on the opposite side. One is the old leather jacket that he swears still smells like his dad no matter how much he’s worn it since. Next to that is Castiel’s old suit and coat, dirty and frayed by the years that have passed. He touches the coat, then buries his fingers in its fabric. He draws in a deep breath and wishes that he could blink and be back in that attic standing beside the angel who still wears it, longing for what he knows best rather than what feels good or easy.

It’s almost too much trying to match what he’s found here to his own present. To think of Donna as an enemy would have been much easier than coming to terms with her as some sort of do-gooder trying to teach him one of life’s most valuable lessons about anticipating a future filled with optimism and hope. He isn’t having it, though, and decides that it’s for the best to call it a night.

While Dean has no reservations about using his future self’s toothbrush to brush his teeth before bed, he can’t ignore that there are two of them in the holder by the sink, although he doesn’t question it further and hastily risks choosing blue over red.

He changes into a silk pajama set that fits him too perfectly to be anyone else’s but his own before sinking into the most comfortable mattress he’s slept on in months.

\--

Winter 1996  
Pulaski, Virginia

Dean’s barely stepped in through the front door and Sam is already getting on his case, grilling him about where he’s been all night.

“Um, what happened to your face?” Sam asks, his voice going soft. Dean looks around and checks off the usual signs that it’s a school night tonight. There are textbooks spread out across the small kitchen table with pens and pencils scattered among them.

“I’m fine,” Dean insists, although he clearly has a nicely sized bruise blooming along the left side of his face and a split lip still oozing a little blood down onto his chin. Although he’s generally been good at it in the past, his strategy for picking pockets could use some improvement. Or maybe he just needs to choose his targets more wisely.

Sam must agree. He stares at Dean in disbelief. “Yeah, right. You’re fine,” he mocks.

Dean shoves past him. He tells him that he really should get back to his math homework before it does itself and he misses out on all the fun. Sam ignores Dean’s teasing. He watches as Dean takes off his coat and tosses it over the back of the couch in the single family ranch-style house on half an acre’s worth of land that John decided to rent after enrolling them in school. Dean walks into the kitchen prepared to raid the fridge for a midnight snack, but he stops short when he catches sight of Sam with the cordless phone in his hands.

Dean’s face looks less than pleased. He leans in closer to listen as it rings. There’s no answer. Not that he would expect there to be one. John always gives the briefest explanations possible, but Dean knows that he’s five hundred miles west of Virginia tracking a wendigo causing trouble for the rangers at a state park.

“What the hell, Sam? You know he’ll call when he’s got something to tell us.” Dean pries the phone from Sam’s hands and hangs it up for him.

Sam apologizes, sarcastic. “I didn’t know it was illegal to call my own father who runs toward the monsters instead of away from them like normal people every once in a while just to see if he’s still alive. It’s been four whole days, Dean. Four.”

“He’s fine,” Dean insists, although deep down he’s no more convinced of that than Sam is. Perhaps even less so.

“You should go wash that blood off your face,” Sam reminds him, gesturing to his own mouth, perfectly in tact. He opens the cabinet and pulls out a bag of trail mix. He offers some to Dean, who hasn’t moved despite his bleeding lip.

“Yeah, right. Times like this I don’t even think we’re related.” Dean reaches around Sam for the box of Oreos instead.

Before he rips into them, he heads to the bathroom to clean up his face. He stares at himself in the mirror, unconcerned. He’s seen his father come back from a hunt looking a hell of a lot worse than this. Then again, John got those injuries fighting evil and saving lives. Dean just got caught stealing from a stack of muscles with a mean right hook. He looks into the mirror again and thinks he looks nothing like his dad.

When he comes out of the bathroom, he finds that his brother has saved all of his M&M’s for him on the counter, but Sam has since dozed off watching late night television on the couch. Dean pops the stockpiled chocolate into his mouth and swipes the remote control from the coffee table, the box of Oreos still waiting for him in the kitchen. He lowers the TV volume as the sound of uproarious sitcom laughter fills the room. One of Sam’s soccer balls that he borrowed from a friend is sitting at his feet, and he lightly kicks it away. Dean sometimes complains that Sam’s always spreading his stuff around everywhere, and Sam usually counters by telling Dean that it’s okay not to return the cassette tape he listens to every single day to its cardboard box each night.

It makes no difference to Dean if it’s a rental house or a motel room or a beach resort in the tropics. Everything about their lives is temporary anyway. There’s comfort in knowing that he could pack up and hit the road at a moment’s notice if he needed to. He welcomes the news from his father that it’s time to move on to a new spot on the map when it comes.

Sam is the one who drags his feet. Wherever they go, he falls into small routines that have semblances of normality, even something stupid like taking out the trash once per week, which he appreciates in a way that Dean doesn’t think he’ll ever understand.

Dean thinks that he ought to be out there wherever Dad is, hunting whatever it is he’s hunting. He knows in his blood that he’s a hunter, and the rest of it is just biding time.

\--

He awakes in the bunker with a strange craving for M&M’s. He isn’t sure which level of inception he’d reached in his dreams last night, but he hopes that he hasn’t hit limbo.

\--

Most of the time it’s Dean who’s the one teaching Sam about stuff, at least according to him, but sometimes it’s the other way around, too. When they were kids, it was Dean teaching Sam how to throw a punch and that frozen vodka worked better than frozen peas as ice packs when you suffered a hit yourself. It was Dean teaching Sam how to shoot a gun and how to shoot pool, how to hustle. How to lie, cheat, and steal. How to fight and hunt. How to make a mess and then clean it up afterward.

Dean is in the bunker’s shooting range with Sam as he begins Day Two of life in 2016. He watches as Sam concentrates and fires, and it feels as if he’s trying to relearn his brother all over again. He wants to believe that he at least has this ahead of him if nothing else. He wants to believe that Sam could come back.

Even if he and Sam aren’t on a hunt, it’s the two of them practicing what they both know, and it feels familiar when little else in this future world does.

“So, Cas has a full-time membership around here now, huh,” Dean says, aiming for casual but missing that mark by a mile. Sam doesn’t take the bait, shrugging off the suggestion to even up the score when it comes to what Sam knows compared to everything that Dean’s still in the dark about.

“What’s that like?” Dean asks, opting for a more direct approach.

Sam bites this time, says, “I know you’re still stuck on how things used to be, but talking to you about Cas is kind of like Monday morning quarterbacking to me.” Dean searches Sam’s face for the intimation of anything equivalent to a smirk, but he comes up empty.

“And talking to you is like trying to consult a damn oracle,” he replies, a little shorter than intended. “I have absolutely no idea what the hell half of what comes out of your mouth even means, and it’s supposed to be my life we’re talking here.”

“Okay, fair enough,” Sam concedes. “Honestly, and don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s been kind of like watching two butterflies circling around each other since practically the day you guys met.”

Dean physically tries shaking the visual imagery of mating rituals involving himself and Cas out of his head.

“Dude, you seriously need to lay off the Discovery Channel,” is just about the only thing his pride will allow himself to say to that.

After a moment, Sam tells him, “You know, we spend so much of our time preventing disasters and avoiding worst case scenarios. Maybe it’s time you see something in your future that’s worth going after instead. It’s not perfect, far from it, but it’s ours. And I think it’s pretty great sometimes.” Sam aims, fires. Hits the target dead center. Dean does the same in return.

\--

He later finds Cas in the library. There are stacks of open books pulled off the surrounding shelves spread out across the long wooden table running down the middle of the room. Dean pauses in the doorway, listening to the music spinning wildly from the record player, the room filled with this newfound Castiel’s presence. He still isn’t quite sure what to make of this Cas, who’s yet another facet of Castiel that he’s somehow going to have to reconcile with all the others he’s encountered in the few long years since they’ve known each other. The Castiel who blew open the doors to a barn in a storm of sparks and invincibility was worlds apart from the almost fully human Cas who nervously drank beer with him at the seediest joint in town, and now there’s this.

He remains undetected leaning against the doorframe until he clears his throat, making his presence known.

“Your quest continues,” Cas states solemnly, turning around from the bookshelf to face Dean, who barely gets a chance to nod before he’s turned his back again. His first impulse is to ask Cas what he’s busy working on, but he hopes that he’ll be long gone before he could be of any valuable assistance.

“What’s it like? Being human, I mean,” he asks instead.

“Big,” Cas tells him plainly. “I don’t know why I thought it would’ve made everything smaller, but now it all seems so much bigger to me. On the inside, as much as the world around us. Now everything seems to be such a great distance away when it wasn’t before.”

Dean circles the table to see what’s on it, moves closer to Cas as he does, says, “I suspect the falling part was metaphorical.”

Cas steps around him, picking up a book off the table and returning it to its shelf. Dean catches a scent from him as he passes by. It’s something soapy and generic, like Dawn or Palmolive or something more citrus, and the fresh scent of it stings Dean’s senses, making his head spin due to its novelty.

“No, it wasn’t.” Cas stands still, facing Dean again. “Although there was that, too.”

Dean forces himself not to react, says, “So now you’re a regular Martha Stewart in the kitchen, listening to golden oldies in the afternoon. Must be kind of like retirement.”

“Not in the least,” Cas laughs, eyes kindling in reminiscence. The sight of him like this throws Dean, the way that the corners of his eyes crinkle accompanied by the low timbre of his laugh. It’s something that Dean doesn’t quite remember seeing or hearing before, not like this, and he feels his heart picking up its pace ever so slightly in response. “You should’ve seen the rug burns we all suffered through when you were teaching me how to fight.”

Dean pulls a face, trying to focus on what Cas is telling him about their future, searching for clues. “Guess you’ve got to learn sometime if you’re going to roll out with the likes of us.”

“Exactly,” Cas agrees. “But luckily, I’ve had a few friends who’ve helped get me through the adjustment period. And let me confess, it’s been no easy achievement.”

“Like with what, for instance? You seem pretty settled from what I can see.”

“I’ve had time to get to this point, Dean. Sleeping on a nightly basis was a big change. You’d think I would’ve needed to catch up on an eternity sleep, but no. You used to heat up wine in the microwave with sugar mixed in to help me drift off in the beginning.”

There’s a fondness in Cas’s voice that makes Dean’s chest tighten. He remembers when his father used to do the same for him when he was little and couldn’t sleep through the night. As the conversation lulls, Dean jumps on the opportunity to give into what he’s been wanting to broach this whole time.

“You got Sammy out,” he says as softly as his voice will allow. He knows that Cas isn’t going to tell him when or how he did it, but he still has to say it aloud anyway. He looks to Cas’s face to receive his silent you’re welcome, but he doesn’t find it there. He pushes himself to go on, needing more answers. “I just don’t get why you fell,” he continues, staring at Cas directly, trying to will him to speak. “I mean, the last time, before Stull, it made sense. But now, back in my time, I can barely get you to stay put for more than five minutes straight.”

Dean knows that this Castiel doesn’t owe him any explanations, but he wants them anyway.

“I’d stay if you asked me to. If you truly meant it,” Cas says quietly, and it reorganizes every single thought in Dean’s head to chaos.

He paces the room, glancing at book titles on the shelves he passes by and not retaining a single one of them.

“Maybe I did. Do. Whatever. You know what I mean,” he says. His voice sounds horribly doubtful even to his own ears, knowing that he’s had plenty of opportunities to tell Cas that he’s wanted him to stay every damn time that he left. Even now he struggles to get the words out past his lips, instead clearing his throat and looking away, distracting himself by skimming his fingertips along the binding of an old leather book he cares nothing for. “Besides, looks to me like we’ve become a pair of damn tourists anyhow.”

Cas inhales deeply. He lowers his eyes, says, “You saw the pictures. Of course. Perhaps I should’ve taken them down.”

“And when would you have done that?” Dean humorlessly asks. “Before or after you didn’t brush your teeth last night?”

The song playing in the background fades out as if on cue. Dean hears the needle shift as the spinning record slows to a stop, leaving a heavy silence in its wake that settles between them until Cas’s voice is the first sound to break through.

“I care about you, Dean Winchester,” he admits quietly. “More than anything else.”

And almost suddenly, Cas is standing in front of him looking like he’s seeing Dean for the first time in days, his close proximity causing Dean to lift his gaze, forcing their eyes to meet. It’s enough to wear all Dean’s doubts down to a single thread that he wants to cut loose. He’s standing about as still as his own beating heart, but he doesn’t want to run from this. He doesn’t think his heart would ever forgive him if he did, so he reaches out to take something that’s been held out to him for so long.

Dean’s hand touches the side of Cas’s face, and Cas leans into it like it’s something he’s been missing. He wants to fit Cas’s mouth to his own like a balm for all the wounds they’ve suffered, both together and on their own. He pulls Cas toward him until his face is so close that he almost knows what it’s like to taste his lips. He leans forward and closes his eyes, but it’s seconds too late.

It’s as if the clock is ticking its final seconds, like the last few grains of sand are falling into the base of the timer.

His time has run out. Everything disappears.

\--

Dean finds himself just as he was in Katherine Mandeville’s attic holding the crystal ball. Its magic has gone dormant again and its light has all but drained out, but he still stares down at it like it might bite him or explode or send him hurtling into an oblivion far worse than the last.

Donna wordlessly greets him with a sly grin as he snaps back into himself from half a million miles away.

“Nice trick you pulled back there. Too bad it’s all smoke and mirrors,” he growls, if for no other reason than to provoke some kind of explanation for her actions.

Light laughter isn’t quite the reaction he was hoping for. “Come on, Dean. You know that’s not true,” she says, shaking a finger in his direction. Then she reaches for the crystal ball, trying for casual as if it shouldn’t be a big deal to either one of them if he were just to hand it over.

“Not on your life, sister,” he replies, taking pleasure in having the advantage.

“You know, you’ve got some trust issues we really ought to work on,” she persists, holding out her hand expectantly and taking a step closer.

“And you’ve got a chemical imbalance if you think blindsiding someone by sending them to another time is an act of building trust.”

Dean stands his ground despite her advances and risks cradling the object closer to his chest.

“Listen, I know exactly what I’m dealing with. I know what it’s all about. I may be unorthodox, but I’m still a hunter. We’re on the same team here, Dean. We’re kind of even friends.”

He still has no intentions of giving in. “If you’re a hunter, then you should know that if you play with fire, you’re bound to get yourself burned. And if you knew me at all, you’d know not to ask.”

After proving his point, he gestures to the crystal ball’s box, and she reluctantly lets him take it. He carefully places the crystal safely back inside and returns downstairs with Donna in tow.

“What’re you going to do with it?” Katherine asks after he explains its connection to Carmen Spencer.

“Destroy it, most likely,” he says. “Can’t cause any trouble if it’s in a million pieces scattered at the bottom of the ocean.”

He contemplates smashing it off the cliffs out back but decides against it. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s called Bobby Singer let alone the last time he’s paid him a visit, but he thinks that maybe he could use some help digging up whatever dirt he can find on crystal balls.

He stands at the front entrance to the estate and watches as Donna walks back to the Ford pickup truck that must be hers.

“Didn’t rattle your cages too hard, did I?” she calls back to him.

“Nothing a hard night of drinking hasn’t already done to me,” he says, kind of cocky.

“You haven’t seen the last of me,” she shouts back. “We’re not done yet, Dean Winchester.”

“Oh, no, sweetheart. We’re still years away from the finish line.”

He watches as she climbs into the truck and then drives away. He turns to take one last look at the estate, its beautiful facade hidden away in its seclusion, and then he opens his car door.

He sinks comfortably into the leather interior, and it feels as equally familiar as the Impala he and Sam had driven in only yesterday. When he starts the engine, he takes a moment just to listen to her purr, his hand unconsciously coming up to his mouth as if to brush off the remains of something he never even got the chance to touch. If this were a board game, Dean feels like he’s just been sent back to Start. He might’ve been inches away from the Cas of the future, less than inches, but the Cas of the present is currently fighting a civil war in another dimension among forces equivalent to hurricanes or worse.

“Earth to Cas,” he mutters to his windshield. “I know I basically said hasta la vista the last time we spoke, but if I’m still on your radar at all, seat’s open if you want to drop on in.”

He waits five minutes with the engine running for nothing to happen, but then Cas appears like clockwork barely before he’s even pulled out onto the main strip.

“What is it, Dean?” Cas is quick to get to the point. He switches on the radio, running interference on angel airwaves to buy them some privacy, and Dean can’t help but recognize the song playing as the same one that Cas was humming along to in the bunker’s library.

“Cas, you look like hell.” Dean considers it as good of a start as any, and the easier statement to make rather than answering him straightaway.

“Thank you,” he says in his usual deadpan manner.

“Guess my sudden disappearance from reality didn’t ping your GPS system,” Dean says. “You’re never going to guess where I’ve just been.”

Cas hesitates, says, “Likely not the east coast of Spain.”

“No, dude. Our future. I’m practically a Time Lord. Still got the crystal TARDIS in the trunk if you want to take a peek.”

“I have no idea what a TARDIS is, Dean.”

“I saw Sam,” Dean starts after a blink of his own personal despair, sparing any and all of the gory details about what else he’d found there. “Said you were the one to spring him loose. I’ve got to ask. Could there be any truth to that?” He doesn’t want to attack Cas with a barrage of questions he might not have answers for, but he’d be lying if he said that rescuing Sam wasn’t his number one priority. He stares at Cas directly to glean from him what he can.

“I don’t know,” Castiel says with uncertainty. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up for something that may never happen. I’ve tried, Dean. I’m still trying.”

Dean’s head swims as a result, and he’s lost all capacity for speech. He watches the painted lines on the road stream by, falling behind them and fading away into the ambiguous past. He drives faster back to the motel.

They don’t talk for the rest of the way.

\--

After Dean parks the car, he stops himself before getting out.

“Cas,” he says, the name rolling off his tongue like the preamble to an invocation. “Why didn’t you come back after Stull?”

Cas glances around and then stares down into his own hands, says, “I did.” His eyes rise to meet Dean’s.

“You what?” Dean asks, anxiety building in his chest for reasons he doesn’t fully know.

“I did come back. And then I left again. Because I had to. Because it was the right thing to do.”

“That’s bull,” Dean scoffs, keeping his jaw clenched tight. He gets out of the car to find Cas already at his side, patiently waiting while he uses the key to unlock the motel room door.

\--

Cas follows him inside, causing the space to feel full and hot with his presence.

“Surprised you haven’t blipped out by now,” Dean casually remarks, disarming himself by setting his .45 down on the nightstand.

“I probably should’ve. I’m putting you in danger just by being here.”

Dean circles back around to where Cas is still standing by the threshold. He doesn’t budge an inch when Dean reaches him. Dean gets the distinct impression that Cas can’t be moved by him or by anyone else, but he underestimates himself, his fortitude alone capable of moving mountains when the time calls for it.

“Well, uh. Have you read my job description lately? I basically thrive in the danger zone. So you shouldn’t. Blip out, I mean. Besides, I could use the company if you decide to stick around for a while.”

“You’re asking me to stay,” Cas divines, speaking slowly. Dean catches himself staring at Cas’s mouth as he speaks, watching the words come out of that dip and bow.

“You’re going to get yourself killed up there. Is it really worth it?” he asks.

“Yes,” Cas says unequivocally.

Dean scratches the back of his neck, says, “Can’t live on the frontlines all the time.” He can’t help what he’s saying. He’s the proverbial dying man in the desert who’s been shown the way to water, and the possibility of life in the bunker remains a vision that’s much too strong for him to forget so easily.

If Cas is reading Dean’s thoughts, he shows no indication of it. “Angels are dying as we speak, Dean.”

But Dean cuts him off. “And what about you? You ready to be Heaven’s next fallen soldier?”

“It makes no difference,” Cas wearily tells him, painfully loyal to his cause. “They need me.”

“Well, what if it does to me?” Dean feels like he’s skating on thin ice, like he might freeze or drown with every passing word because the consequences of what he says and does here are more real to him than in a future that may or may not ever even happen. After a few false starts, he forces himself to say those words that could change it all. “What if I need you?”

Although Dean has proven himself invincible in the face of ghosts, demons, and all creatures that go bump in the night, he’s excruciatingly human when it comes to admitting what he wants, what he needs, what’s really worth chasing after.

Cas’s silence does nothing to make him feel any better about any of this.

“Cas, I care about what happens to you,” he continues, echoing words from another point in time. “Past, present, future. Alternate freaking universes. Whatever. So I’m asking you to stay this time. With me.”

Dean still doesn’t receive a response. He barely sees more than a twitch of the muscle in his jaw and the shifting of his hands, both kept in tight fists at his sides. Dean wants nothing more than to pull them open and reel him in.

He steps closer, backing Cas up against the door behind him with a hand pressed flat to his chest, holding him still, desperate for him not to disappear. Castiel’s doubts flicker across his face like dancing candlelight, but then his resistance all but dissolves when Dean takes his face into his hands and their mouths collide like the earth kissing the sky at the horizon, as if that’s the way it’s always been. Cas tastes like everything and nothing all at once, and Dean’s insatiable for it.

It’s far from what he’d imagined it would be. It isn’t the inexpert press of lips he’d expected. Instead, Cas kisses him so openly that Dean thinks he might fall inside. He has few complaints, his emotions running wild like horses, running far deeper than desire or even need. He vaguely thinks that he might be in love with Cas, that he’s been in love with Cas for a long time, but he can’t quite process the implications of what that means when Cas’s mouth is sealed to his own.

When the kiss splits, it’s quiet afterward, as if the dust is finally settling after the whirlwind that has been their time together, and things feel at peace. It’s in the way Castiel’s shoulders loosen a little, in the tiniest of smiles that grace his lips, and in the glint that Dean somehow always seems to find himself searching for in that persistent gaze of his. They hardly need words now, the biggest of which have already been said.

When Castiel strays too far, Dean’s fingers lace around his, silently asking him not to go. They share a soft look, and Dean gives him a small nod and a tiny smile before vanishing.

The solidity of his presence still lingers, though, allowing Dean to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep. Once he awakes come morning, he discovers that all of the electrical outlets in the room are dead.

“Son of a bitch.”

\--

After checking out of the motel, Dean takes the scenic route out of town. He cruises along the Atlantic coastline, the salty ocean breeze kissing his face through the open car windows as he catches sight of the breakers peaking and crashing at the shore.

Time’s hands have shaped him into a new creation. He knows this. He remembers himself at twenty-six when his whole world revolved around the hunt. It still does, in many ways more now than ever before, but he admits that there’s something else out there for him, too.

Although he’s still not entirely convinced that everything he’d found in that future world that he’d been thrust into was any less of a fantasy than Cindy Crawford taking him to the senior prom when he was sixteen, he wouldn’t exactly be devastated if he were to return to the bunker in Kansas somewhere down the road in his own timeline.

He might even allow himself to be happy about it.

His phone buzzes, and he digs it out of his pocket with one hand still on the wheel. Katherine has sent him a nervous text message asking about the mysterious and widespread power outages along the entire northeastern coast.

“That was an unfortunate side effect,” Cas remarks, suddenly appearing in the passenger seat.

“I can only think of one other better way to sabotage the electrical grid. And while I may be that easy, you’re not. At least not yet,” Dean remedies. He replies to Katherine’s message, telling her that it’s nothing to be concerned about.

Cas waits patiently and watches him with intent.

“You asked me to stay, and I left,” he says. Dean stares at him directly in return. He’s already decided how he’s going to play this one out.

“I’ll live,” he slights, eyes looking back to the road.

“I had to, but it’s not what you think. We’re going to get Sam out, and then I’m going to stay. Permanently.”

Dean feels as if Cas has just shifted a continent for him. Again.

“But what about Heaven?” he asks.

“Heaven has its drones to fight its wars. There’s only one Dean Winchester,” Cas smiles softly, his eyes falling on Dean as he speaks. “I choose him every time.”

Dean knows that Cas has always held a hand to Heaven for him. That much will forever remain true, but he still has to ask if Cas is sure about his decision.

“Yes,” Cas tells him. “That is, if it’s what you want as well.”

Of course it’s what Dean wants. Cas is his best friend, and he’s in love with him.

“Yeah,” Dean says, finally letting a wide smile break through. “More than anything else.” He turns on the radio when he finds himself alone in the car once again, and heavy rock music comes blaring out of the Impala’s speakers in a rush of sound.

As his fingers drum along to the beat against the steering wheel, he remembers not being able to imagine what could’ve possibly made Newport so special to Cas in five years’ time.

Now he knows.


End file.
